Final recording

This is my final recording, and I’ve tried to focus on all areas of pronunciation that I have worked on – I find that is the hardest thing, putting it all together, and it takes a lot of practice.

Looking back, I feel that the most useful for me has been the practice of reading out loud, ideally with the assistance of a native speaker or an expert. Simply recording myself and comparing doesn’t work as well, as my ear is not sensitive enough to catch all my mistakes. Another thing that helped was simply to use the archetype, stopping after each sentence, and repeating it several times. Also, reading about the features of the sounds definitely increased my understanding of the sounds that I should be producing – the implication for me as a teacher would be the importance of teaching learners a little phonology theory when we practice pronunciation.

I feel that I have improved in my pronunciation of the soft and hard “r”, the vowels, /θ/, and /b/. I’m still not confident about the /x/, and that is an area I still need to work on. I have practiced it by taking lots of words that have it and repeating them over and over again, and during a practice session it definitely improves (and I think it’s much better in this recording!). Also, I get a sore throat after a practice session… true story.

It was interesting to go through this process and see the deliberate pronunciation practice from the perspective of the learner. In the past I mostly replied on imitation – more conscious and purposeful, in the case of English, and more superficial in the case of other languages; but in both cases it was random and without method or any focused exercises.

Recording 8